


The Joy, Too

by weirdmilk



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Canon, Quite a lot of angst, and a lot of, and sex! :x, but also some fluff at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-24 21:34:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14364159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weirdmilk/pseuds/weirdmilk
Summary: Iwaizumi has always considered his friendship with Oikawa to be a constant, permanent presence - whether he likes it or not. The possibility that they might drift apart had never occurred to him. Such an event would not - could not! - happen. They had always been a package deal: buy one, get one free. The setter and the ace. Tooru and Hajime. A two-stick popsicle. And even then - had he allowed himself to ruminate over such an outcome - he wouldn’t have expected the drift to begin as soon as Oikawa left. He’d always put more stock in their combined ability to weather any storm that came their way. Maybe he’d been wrong to.Maybe it hadn’t been a drift, at all - maybe it had been a wrenching.An exploration of a mental breakdown, starring one Oikawa Tooru, one Iwaizumi Hajime, and guest-starring a certain Ushijima Wakatoshi.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is a bit of a strong one. please don't read if you're sensitive to really bad decisions involving a lot of pills. or grilled fish.

 

 

> “I’m only a little messed up. I’m tortured to the point where I don’t sleep very well sometimes, and I don’t answer mail as I should. Sometimes I feel a languor of spirit when I get an email asking me to do something.”
> 
> — from ‘The Anthologist’ by Nicholson Baker
> 
> * * *
> 
>  

Iwaizumi has always considered his friendship with Oikawa to be a constant, permanent presence - whether he likes it or not. The possibility that they might drift apart had never occurred to him. Such an event would not - could not! - happen. They had always been a package deal: buy one, get one free. The setter and the ace. Tooru and Hajime. A two-stick popsicle. And even then - had he allowed himself to ruminate over such an outcome - he wouldn’t have expected the drift to begin as soon as Oikawa left. He’d always put more stock in their combined ability to weather any storm that came their way. Maybe he’d been wrong to.  
  
His relationship with Oikawa has never been typical. He knows that. It has always existed on two levels, as an iceberg does. There had been the part that everyone else had seen - the bickering, the sniping, the punches. But then, like the ice that sits low in the water, there had been Iwaizumi lying in Oikawa’s lap, worn out and floppy after long match days. Oikawa running his long fingers silently through his hair. Iwaizumi noticing the shape of Oikawa’s mouth during pre-game speeches, and failing to hear anything coming out of it. And he’d always loved those secret times, but he’d been terrified of them, too.

And then, there had been this: the night before Oikawa’s departure. It had brought the storm with it. There had been the two of them - as always, there had been the two of them - sitting on the step outside Oikawa’s house. They had talked, a little. They had laughed, less than usual. They had kissed, once, which was more than usual. More than ever. Oikawa had twisted his body, ready to go back inside, to leave him. And then he’d turned back - given Iwaizumi a bright, edgy smile, like a broken lightbulb, and taken his face in his hands. Had kissed him, sweet and violent at the same time, like the sweet taste of arsenic - and then he’d bolted before Iwaizumi could react.

Iwaizumi had stayed on the step for hours, but Oikawa had not reappeared. He’d left the next day, as planned - because Oikawa is hideously single-minded, and can't be stopped by anything less cataclysmic than his own death, probably - and had not called Iwaizumi to announce his arrival in Tokyo, as he'd promised he would. Iwaizumi had called him three times that day, and seven the next. A week later, Iwaizumi had stopped calling. Six weeks later, Oikawa’s continued silence rings in Iwaizumi’s ears like a death knell.

Maybe it hadn’t been a drift, at all - maybe it had been a wrenching.

His life is fine, without Oikawa. He’s fine. He likes his classes, and he likes his new teammates. He has friends. He even still sees Hanamaki and Matsukawa, who had both stuck around in Miyagi after graduation. He wouldn’t have expected those two to be his longest hangover from high school. His life is fine. Right now, he is walking home, after shopping for his dinner: something that fine people do. He rearranges the plastic bags in his hands so that they don’t cut into his palms. He thinks, I’d better get this fish home, better make some dinner, soon. He trudges forwards, the line of his shoulders smudged and unimpressive. He ruminates on the relative ripeness of the set of plums in his bag.

A sharp trill from his pocket makes him jump. He pauses in the middle of the pavement. He sighs, and shifts one plastic bag to the other hand so he can retrieve his phone. 

The name on the screen makes his stomach feel as though it’s dropped into the bottom of his bags. Oikawa Tooru.

Oikawa Tooru. Iwaizumi stares at the phone in disbelief for a moment before scrambling to press the little green button. ‘Oikawa! Jesus, nice of you to drop in - how the hell - where are you, what are you -’

‘Iwa-chan,’ Oikawa’s voice murmurs. A slow sigh ghosts across the line. The disembodied voice is quiet and there’s an indefinable strangeness to it that frightens him, like the subtle wrongness of a white, cloudless sky. A frost begins to bloom inside his lungs. Dread creeps through him. 

‘Hey,’ Iwaizumi says, ‘what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ Oikawa says, in that too-pale voice, ‘I just wanted… to hear you…’

‘What the fuck,’ Iwaizumi hisses, panicked, swinging his plastic bags around as he might a dance partner, and prompting a dark scowl from an elderly man next to him on the pavement for his energies.

‘Thanks,’ Oikawa murmurs, and the line goes dead, and any chance of Iwaizumi keeping his appointment with dinner dies along with it. His stomach is a rock. Something is terribly wrong. He senses it as easily as he sees the people around him, the ground underneath his shoes. Something is rotten in Oikawa’s world. He stands still and silent in the middle of the unknowing throng, as they all move around him like a parting sea. A terrible responsibility clutches at his sleeve. He doesn’t know how to explain the heaviness in his chest, but he knows that it isn't misplaced. 

He calls Oikawa back, but there’s no answer. 

He walks home, in a quick daze. He keeps his phone in his hand, but the screen stays dark and silent. Once he’s home, he puts his shopping in the fridge, still in the plastic bags. The clock ticks. Somehow, minutes are passing, despite Iwaizumi's sense that time has stopped entirely. The room is quiet. He stands in the doorway, and calls Oikawa again.

‘Hello? Hello?’ Someone has picked up, but it’s not Oikawa. Iwaizumi's stomach drops further. The voice sounds familiar, but he can't spare the thought processes to place it. He can only think about Oikawa. 

‘Where’s Oikawa?’

There is a quick, sharp breath. ‘Who’s calling?’

‘Iwaizumi Hajime.’ Iwaizumi is shaking from his head to his toes. ‘I’m his best friend.’

‘I know who you are,’ the voice says. ‘How soon can you get here?’

‘I’ll come now,’ Iwaizumi says shakily. ‘Now. Immediately. Please. I don’t know. A few hours. As fast as I can. What’s happened?’

‘I can’t say for certain,’ the voice, who Iwaizumi suddenly realises is Ushijima Wakatoshi, tells him, ‘but he’s not well.’

‘Not well?’ Iwaizumi bursts out, furious at the vagueness. ‘Specifics - please?’

‘Not on the phone,’ Ushijima says. His voice contains a tiny tremor that is more terrifying than a scream. ‘I’ll meet you at the hospital. NTT Medical Center.’

‘The - hospital?’ Iwaizumi’s voice is now so shaky and high-pitched that he doesn’t recognise it as his own. ‘Jesus - what’s he -? Is it his knee?’ Iwaizumi knows, even as he asks, that it isn’t his knee. Not this time.

There’s another pause. ‘No,’ Ushijima says finally. Iwaizumi had never thought he’d feel so devastated to hear that Oikawa’s knee is fine. ‘No, it’s not his knee. Please come.’ The line goes blank. There's silence, again. 

Iwaizumi feels as though he might vomit - right there, alone in his kitchen. Ghostly fingers have closed around his throat; he can’t find enough air in the room. I have to calm down, he thinks - I have to - this isn’t helping -

He leans against the wall and tries to breathe through the tightness. The fingers around his throat let him go, after a moment. He pulls in a gasp. His mind returns to him with a single-minded focus: get to Oikawa. That's all there is. It's all he can see. Everything else is immaterial. Oikawa is in trouble, and Iwaizumi is going to get him out of it, whatever that involves. He will save Oikawa, or die trying. That is the truth of it, and it always has been.

He calls his mother, who’s still at work. She picks up, but Iwaizumi can't remember what she says, and he barely remembers his side of the conversation, either. He knows that he tells her Oikawa is sick, and in hospital, and in Tokyo. He knows that she makes soothing, gentle noises down the phone, and that they make him feel even more hopelessly young and frightened, because there had been a time that his mother could have solved all his problems with a kiss and a band-aid, but this isn't one of them. This must, instead, be adulthood. He tells her that he has to go to Tokyo, and she tells him that of course, of course, he must go to Tokyo. He cries, and cries, and buys a ticket as he throws clothes into a bag. 

 

* * *

 

By the time he gets to Tokyo, it’s nearly dark, and there's a bite in the air. It’s almost summer: he hadn’t thought to pack his warmer clothes, so his t-shirt leaves his arms exposed and shivering. The hospital is a welcome sight for more than one reason: a harbour, huge and white. Oikawa is in there, somewhere. Behind one of the windows, he'll be sleeping. Iwaizumi has a healthy respect for hospitals, but he still suppresses a shudder at the thought of how much pain must be trapped inside one building, clawing at the walls.

Iwaizumi feels as though he’s walking towards the gallows, rather than towards his best friend of eighteen years. The six weeks of silence stretches beyond weeks and feels like a lifetime, and it fills the clean white corridors with a hopeless uncertainty. A small old man rolls past, in a wheelchair. Iwaizumi swallows back his revulsion. It’s a place of pain after all. He had been right to feel that way. It’s not right that Oikawa’s here. Fresh, bright Oikawa belongs in a field of flowers, in an apple orchard. On the volleyball court, more than anywhere, when all the ropes he’s tied around himself fall away.

He pauses outside the room for a moment. His stomach roils like a far-out ocean. For a moment he doubts his own ability to walk through the door, but then, unbidden, the memory of Oikawa’s voice from the previous evening - pale and wan and lifeless - wafts into his head, and his hand is on the doorknob before his thoughts get any more cowardly. The latch is quiet - it must have been oiled, recently, Iwaizumi thinks, inanely - and he steps inside.

It’s both better than he’d hoped, and worse than he’d feared. Oikawa is alive, which is an ideal situation. Oikawa is white and unwell and deathly still in a hospital bed: a nightmare. There are several clear tubes emanating from him - they look like veins. There's a monitor next to his bed, too, but Iwaizumi has no idea what it's monitoring. The image of Oikawa surrounded by medical equipment is, he thinks, the single worst snapshot he's ever seen. His mind offers him a slideshow of his worst moments: the death of his grandfather, the final, crushing loss against Karasuno, the car accident his father had got them into when he was twelve. But no matter how hard his brain tries, none of them comes close to this: the sight of Oikawa, as unwelcome as a bruise underneath the white sheets, hands awkwardly laid on his chest so as to not tangle the tubes. He is so, so pale. He looks bloodless. He could be carved out of ice.

What the hell happened? What could have happened, to have brought Oikawa to such bruised and broken knees? Iwaizumi can’t understand it.

If he’s really, truly honest with himself, a deep, dark guess is coagulating in an unused reserve of his brain, but the unformulated thought is so horrific that he doesn’t dare to let it fully solidify. But in the same way that a sailor, in a little wooden boat, would recognise a shadow as a shark, he knows.

But he does allow himself to think this: Oikawa has been running too fast for too long. Oikawa has been carrying boulders in broken arms. Oikawa has, perhaps, been falling for so long that it has looked like flying, all along. He thinks that he’s made a terrible mistake, in letting Oikawa pull away. Hasn’t he always been Oikawa’s anchor? Hasn’t he always been the string to Oikawa’s kite? Hasn’t he always been the angel on Oikawa’s shoulder, when Oikawa has always been the devil himself? What had he expected, when Oikawa had left, to go it alone? This is all his fault - this room is the sum total of his failures to keep Oikawa safe -

‘Hey.’ A hoarse voice breaks him out of his thoughts. Oikawa squints at him, and touches a hand to his own throat, with a grimace. ‘Breathe.’

Iwaizumi touches his fingers to his own cheeks and they come away wet. His mouth feels dry. He thinks he might have been hyperventilating. 

‘Sit down,’ Oikawa rasps. ‘You look worse than I do, and I look pretty bad.’ He grins weakly up at Iwaizumi, but the faint attempt at levity is spoiled when he coughs, face crumpling in pain. He touches his neck again, and makes another face. He gestures to the plain plastic chair next to the bed, and Iwaizumi collapses into it, feeling that he would have collapsed straight onto the floor, otherwise.

‘Please -’ Oikawa rasps, ‘please - Hajime - it’s okay - please don’t look at me like that.’ Oikawa’s white skin is becoming stained with a pink flush, but it doesn’t make him look any healthier. It makes him look worse - feverish, sick. Really sick. 

Iwaizumi feels such a crushing despair. His world is falling apart in front of him, right here, in a hospital bed. The weight of what's in front of him is making it hard to breathe, again. ‘It’s - _okay_?’ Please, Oikawa. Please. What happened? Why didn’t you call me?’ Why did you kiss me, and leave? Is this my fault? What did you do - what did you do - ? Is this my fault? Is this my -

Oikawa’s eyes dart, skittish, from Iwaizumi, to the bedside table, to the bolted window, to the clean floor. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. He is looking more anxious by the second - his hands are fiddling with his bedding, and his chest is moving in quick, shaky jerks, and Iwaizumi wonders whether he needs to call a nurse, because this - cannot be good for Oikawa - not like this -

Iwaizumi makes a desperate, frustrated noise and stands up. He paces the length of the room. He doesn’t know what to say. He feels like a child at a funeral, too small to understand such great pain.

‘Please,’ Oikawa says, the urgency in his voice a terribly unwelcome note against Iwaizumi’s eardrums, ‘I’m so tired - Hajime, I don’t know what you want me to say -’ He sits up and gestures towards a glass of water, swallowing, and wincing with it. Again, his white hand touches his throat. Iwaizumi pushes the glass towards his hands.

‘Hey,’ Iwaizumi says quickly, all the frustration dissolving into nothing at the sight of Oikawa’s hands trembling so hard around the glass that his nails make a noise like rain. They’ve been here before, but never this deep - never this bad. He remembers Kitagawa Daiichi. Kageyama. The goddamn knee. So many moments dance before his eyes, as though on a merry-go-round. He’d never have believed that they’d be the trailers to this one. Maybe he had just never wanted to. Has he been selfish, to refuse to even acknowledge the potentiality of this outcome? 

The water level is dangerously high inside the glass, and Oikawa’s clearly struggling to keep it from spilling. ‘Hey - let me.’ Iwaizumi leans over to support the bottom of it; he lets it rest against Oikawa’s mouth. Oikawa’s teeth clink slightly against the glass, as he shakes and sips and shakes. There’s a dreadful intimacy in it, and Iwaizumi never wants to experience it again.

‘Okay?’ Iwaizumi asks. Oikawa nods mutely. Iwaizumi places the glass back on the table for him. It makes a dull thunk when he puts it down too hard, even though he’d tried to be gentle. Story of his life, he thinks.

Oikawa has collapsed back onto the pillow as though he’d just played a five-set game, rather than simply made an abortive attempt to get himself some water. Iwaizumi perches on the edge of the chair, ready to spring forward, should Oikawa get another horrible notion in his head - to reach for a book, perhaps, or to grab his phone. But really, Oikawa looks exhausted and strung out on his invisible horrors, and Iwaizumi thinks it’s unlikely that he’s planning any daring moves. Hell, he’s probably not planning further than his next breath.

There is such tiredness to Oikawa’s body, where it lies, under the stiff sheets. Iwaizumi wants so badly to reach out and touch him - to envelop him, and let his hands warm Oikawa’s freezing skin, but he can’t. He knows that Oikawa won’t be able to accept the comfort he needs. His shoulders would be stiff and unyielding under Iwaizumi’s hands, and he wouldn't let the warmth reach his skin.

‘I’m sorry.’ Oikawa’s voice - already ruined - breaks into smaller pieces. His mouth is an unstable scrawled line. His hands shake, hard, like a sapling in a storm.

‘What for?’ Iwaizumi knows. Of course he knows. But he wants Oikawa to tell him.

Oikawa closes his mouth. His vague gaze slides from Iwaizumi to the window. Children are playing outside. They laugh and shout. The laughter sounds like screaming, after a while. He's not going to share the story. 

‘How about I don’t ask you any questions for a while,’ Iwaizumi says. ‘And you go back to sleep, but I’ll stay here for a while.’

Oikawa nods immediately. His mouth wobbles; his forehead wrinkles in misery.

‘But,’ Iwaizumi says, wanting to make it as clear as glass, ‘ _if you want to talk to me_ \- anyone, Oikawa, please, please.’ Please, he thinks again, please. 

‘I don’t need it,’ Oikawa says firmly. He closes his eyes, and keeps them that way. Iwaizumi buries his face in his hands, now that Oikawa can’t see him. He breathes out a shaky, hopeless gust of air into his own palms. It’s not right. It isn’t fair. He indulges himself, for a moment, in that rickety plastic chair - he lets himself shake, and crack, and bend. And then, he takes a deep breath, and sits up straight.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there for. The near-darkness melts into full darkness. Outside, the children have stopped laughing - gone home, or back to their own hospital rooms. He spends the time in a silent vigil, watching Oikawa’s face flicker. At least for this moment, he looks at peace. And if he can ignore the tubes - the ghostly pallor of Oikawa’s face - he might just be sleeping in his own bed, and it might not hurt like this. 

There’s a neat, rhythmic knock at Oikawa’s door. Iwaizumi snaps his neck up to check it hasn’t woken Oikawa, before tiptoeing to the door to answer it himself. He opens it and comes face to face with Ushijima Wakatoshi. Live, in the flesh, as promised. He is as huge and mountainous as always, but something is off-kilter: his clothes look slept in, and there’s a coffee stain on his sleeve. In another universe, the sight of Ushijima looking so exhausted might have brought him delight, but in this one, he just feels intensely grateful to not be alone anymore.

‘How is he?’ Ushijima’s voice is quiet - a whisper, almost - but there’s still the hint of his usual baritone rumble.

‘He won’t say,’ Iwaizumi says, miserable. ‘He’s - okay, I think. He’s not as bad as I’d expected. He still - seems like himself. But I don't know if that's - if it's real, you know? I think it's just an act. I don't know.’

Ushijima nods to himself, calm and slow and cow-like. ‘You look terrible. Let me take you to eat.’

Iwaizumi hesitates. He casts a quick look over at Oikawa, but he looks to be truly asleep, his chest rising and falling slowly, in a reasonable facsimile of peace. The lines on his face are still there, but lighter. He feels torn. Will Oikawa wake, soon? Will he even want Iwaizumi there, when he does? He bites his lip.

‘Iwaizumi-san,’ Ushijima says, ‘you cannot neglect your own health. It won’t help him.’

Iwaizumi - miraculously - feels something other than misery: irritation. Ushijima is such a goody-goody, he thinks. But he recognises the truth in the words, and he hoists his bag over his shoulder, quietly, padding out of the room on gentle feet. ‘Fine,’ he mumbles, ‘but you’re paying.’

If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn he saw the shadow of a smile on Ushijima’s brick wall of a face.

Hospitals at night feel liminal. Transitional. Strange. The corridors feel longer, and there is an otherness to the way that they fade at the edges. He stares at the signs on the wall. There has to be more than this pain, Iwaizumi thinks, there has to be something other than the sickness. He hears the cry of a baby, and he wonders why it's crying. He walks past an empty bed, half-sticking out from a side room. He sees a wheelchair parked next to the wall. Ghosts, everywhere, he’s sure of it, touching his hair, and pulling at his sleeve. So much sickness, he thinks again. But he reminds himself that Oikawa is still here - he’s not a ghost. He’s still warm, still human, still Oikawa. All is not lost - it's just hiding. The lights are still on; they’ll still light his way. The child doesn't cry for him.

Ushijima strides in front, despite the almost imperceptible slump of his shoulders. He takes a left, and Iwaizumi follows him into a little cafe. It’s dark inside: the only light comes from the corridors, and it only touches the room lightly. The fridges are empty, and there’s no one on the tills, but there are a few vending machines scattered around. Coffee, tea, cans. And food, too, although Iwaizumi doesn’t feel as though he’ll be able to eat anything substantial. He feels like a squeezed can, himself. 

Ushijima doesn’t lead them towards the vending machines, anyway: instead, he brings out a thermos flask from his own bag, and puts it on one of the small silver tables. He digs in his bag again - expression one of the utmost concentration - and from the bottom, he pulls out two bananas, along with two slices of strawberry cake. He puts one slice of cake on one side of the table, and the other in front of Iwaizumi. He slides the banana to him, as well.

‘Uh,’ Iwaizumi says. ‘Is that for me?’

‘The banana,’ Ushijima informs him, ‘is good for potassium.’

‘What’s the cake for?’

‘It’s just delicious.’

Iwaizumi tries to take a moment to compose himself, but fails miserably, and he laughs out loud, for a blessed, starry second. ‘Sorry - sorry. I just - hadn’t expected you to do that.’ He grins, feeling warmer towards Ushijima than he ever has in his life - which, admittedly, isn’t saying much, as until this day he’s felt nothing but ice cold contempt for him. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’

‘You must keep your strength up,’ Ushijima says. ‘It’s not much - and there is too much sugar - but I was in a rush, and did not have time to create something nutritionally balanced.’ Ushijima’s steadiness seems to wobble. He doesn’t look away from Iwaizumi, but he seems to look past him. Iwaizumi can guess what he’s seeing.

‘You called the ambulance, didn’t you?’ Iwaizumi can still hear the tinny panic in Ushijima voice, from that awful phone call.

Ushijima’s eyes lose their haziness, and lock back on Iwaizumi’s own. ‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Please tell me,’ Iwaizumi says, ‘he won’t talk to me. I think I know. I - think I know. But I want to hear it.’

Ushijima nods, slowly. It’s not so much an agreement, as it is a consideration. Slow and ponderous. ‘He missed practice,’ Ushijima says, and then, ‘no - it was before that. The morning practice, he’d attended. But he was - not really there.’

‘Not there?’ Iwaizumi echoes.

‘Distracted. Slow. He was benched after fifteen minutes.’

‘What did he say?’

Ushijima smiles, grim and knowing. ‘Nothing.’

Iwaizumi stares at him. ‘Nothing? About being benched?’

Ushijima shrugs. ‘Something wasn’t right. I told you.’ Iwaizumi nods, swallowing.

‘And then he missed evening practice.’

‘Yes,’ Ushijima says, and takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with the stale hospital air. This is hard for him, Iwaizumi realises, surprised despite himself. He’s just never thought of Ushijima as being capable of feeling anything other than smugness. ‘His door was unlocked.’ He takes another breath, but Iwaizumi thinks it’s just so he can delay the earthquake. ‘He was lying on the bathroom floor. He was covered in vomit. There were - painkillers in his bedroom.’ Ushijima’s words are coming faster, and there’s a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. Iwaizumi watches the sheen, because he can't look at his face. 

He can’t say that he hadn’t expected it. He can’t say that he’d expected anything more wholesome. Regardless, he can’t pretend that hearing the tale doesn’t make his heart stop beating, momentarily, the flow of blood stilling, waiting. How had Oikawa done it, he wonders? Had he taken the painkillers with haste  - shoved them into his mouth, handful upon handful, some inevitably spilling onto the floor? Or had he taken them with a grim calmness, one by one, or two by two, until they were gone?   
  
‘I should never have let him go,’ Iwaizumi mumbles, more to himself than Ushijima.

Ushijima shakes his head, and Iwaizumi recognises the certainty in his expression. It’s the first time he’s looked anything like the untouchable titan Iwaizumi has hated and respected for the majority of his life. ‘It’s not your fault. I was here with him. I should have - been more watchful.’

Iwaizumi can’t help a wry smile from spreading across his face. ‘Maybe it’s neither of our faults. Maybe it’s just Oikawa being the crazy asshole that he is.’

Iwaizumi watches in surprise as Ushijima breaks into a smile, too. Look at that, he thinks, the two of us bonding over Oikawa’s rattling insanity. ‘There might be something in that,’ he allows. Humour, Iwaizumi marvels: Ushijima has a sense of humour. The world just keeps on ending, piece by piece. 

‘Do you have anywhere to stay tonight?’ Ushijima asks him, after a moment of lapsed silence.

‘No,’ Iwaizumi admits, and then grimaces. ‘I thought I’d just check into the cheapest hotel.’

‘No.’ Ushijima frowns. ‘Come home with me. We have a spare futon. I can’t let you stay in a hotel.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am always sure,’ Ushijima informs him. Iwaizumi just manages to prevent himself from rolling his eyes.

‘Then - that would be very kind, thank you,’ Iwaizumi says, stiff and awkward. Extending gratitude to Ushijima still feels a little unpleasant - but only a little. 

It’s just another symptom of the rotting world they’re living in, he thinks: Ushijima offering Iwaizumi a place to sleep. And - even more incredible - Iwaizumi’s acceptance of that offer. They’re growing up, the two of them - and the knowledge of that growth shines a light on the fact that close by, Oikawa’s own life has been battered and bent by his own careful hand. Iwaizumi’s eyes burn. He looks away. Everything feels too intense. The semi darkness in which they’re sitting feels more revealing than the overhead lights would have been.

 

Sitting in that dark cafeteria, in quiet conversation with the object of most of his adolescent loathings, Iwaizumi feels as though he’s managed to remove a small stone from his shoe. He has never felt so touched by such small kindnesses. He can’t explain this to Ushijima, but he smiles weakly, and Ushijima smiles back. It’s a start.

* * *

 

As agreed, he sleeps at Ushijima’s house, that night. Ushijima had made up the spare futon for him in the living room, and it had been comfortable enough. Iwaizumi had expected a sleepless night, but in reality, he had been so exhausted that he’d fallen asleep immediately - right through until the morning, when the wafting smell of grilled fish reaches his nostrils.

He grabs his phone to check the time. It’s nearly eleven in the morning. Iwaizumi feels a rising panic: what if Oikawa wonders where he is? What if, during the night, Oikawa had managed to abscond, and do something worse - and now, he’s lying dead in a ditch, somewhere? Iwaizumi sits up in one sharp motion. He had been stupid to fall asleep. He had been stupid not to stay there.

He wriggles out of the futon and grabs his jeans, pulling them on with anxious haste. He roots around in his bag until he finds a clean t-shirt. He’s just pulling it over his head when Ushijima appears, holding a pan in one hand.  
  
‘Hey -’ Iwaizumi pants, through the cotton, ‘thanks for letting me stay - I need to get back to the hospital, right now, right now -’

‘You need breakfast first,’ Ushijima says. ‘I’ll call you a taxi, soon. Please eat, first, however.’ His face is pleasantly neutral, but Iwaizumi suspects that if he tried to rush out without eating anything, Ushijima would prevent him from doing so by any means necessary, and probably without changing his expression.

‘Fine!’ Iwaizumi snaps, throwing up his hands in acquiescence. Frustration and fear break inside him like waves upon sand.

‘Grilled fish,’ Ushijima says helpfully.

‘Fine.’ Iwaizumi glowers at him, folding his arms.  
  
Ushijima points the pan at him threateningly. ‘It will be,’ he says, ‘delicious.’

Iwaizumi finishes wrestling with his t-shirt, and meekly follows Ushijima into the kitchen. He has to admit that it smells good, especially after nearly twenty-four hours without a proper meal. He sighs. Ushijima has bested him again. Asshole, he thinks, but to his own surprise, the insult is tinged with fondness. Ushijima’s uncomplicated kindness the previous night, he thinks, had probably saved him from ending up in the room next to Oikawa, a gibbering wreck.

Ushijima’s kitchen is small, but warm, and there are a bewildering assortment of plants on the windowsill. Each plant has a neat, handwritten label attached to its pot. Iwaizumi has no idea how to pronounce most of them. They are all lush, dark greens - they are obviously loved, deeply. Ushijima’s huge, callused hands must move over the tiny leaves with gentle precision. Iwaizumi has never seen Ushijima use his hands for anything other than volleyball. He wonders what it looks like. 

‘Can I help?’ Iwaizumi wants something to take his mind off the hospital. 

‘You can carry the plates.’ Magnanimously, Ushijima hands him two portions of steaming grilled fish, accompanied with a small pile of fluffy white rice. Iwaizumi, for a fleeting, unhelpful moment, wonders what Ushijima would do if he dropped them. He holds the edges more firmly, just in case.

They eat at Ushijima’s kotatsu. It’s quiet, but Iwaizumi doesn’t mind, and hadn’t expected anything different. Neither of them are really big talkers. Iwaizumi is comfortable in quiet, but Oikawa can’t stand it. He imagines Oikawa sitting at one side of the kotatsu, too, chattering blithely to himself to fill the void. If he thinks about it hard enough, he can almost see the curve of Oikawa’s arm resting against the table, a strand of hair dancing jerkily in the draft from the window. But it’s just the fantasy of a ruffled mind. He wishes - with a sudden childishness - that Oikawa had been here too - to see the humanity in Ushijima’s more quiet moments. He wishes, badly, that everything had gone differently, but wishing never has done him any good, and he shovels fish into his mouth with a determined slant of his wrist, to quiet his thoughts. Ushijima has cooked him breakfast. He will enjoy it. Oikawa will not take that.

‘You’re a good cook,’ Iwaizumi tells Ushijima, as the fish melts like butter on his tongue.

‘When you are an athlete, you have to feed yourself good food,’ Ushijima says. ‘You have to nourish yourself, before you can be your best.’

Iwaizumi wonders what the insides of Oikawa’s fridge looks like. Empty and dark, he suspects. Oikawa has never put much stock in feeding himself. Oikawa has a pithy disregard for anything so basic as nutrition. Iwaizumi believes that his distaste for the necessities of eating stems from the fact that there is no way to get around it: it puts him on the same level as everyone else, which is a level that Oikawa can't stand to be on. Oikawa hates the reminders of his own limits, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Iwaizumi has, on multiple occasions, forced Oikawa to sit down on a rickety stool in his kitchen, and cooked him food, too, just like this. He has seen Oikawa’s ravenous eyes, upon the presentation of a steaming, home-cooked meal. He thinks Oikawa, if he would let himself, would enjoy food. He thinks Oikawa would enjoy a lot of things, if he’d only allow himself to. 

He swallows the final few grains of rice. The butterflies that have taken up long-term residence in his stomach, which had lain dormant during the breakfast, sense the imminent hospital trip. They begin fluttering again in earnest, beating their wings back and forth. He taps his fingers against the wood. It feels strange to be here, warm, and well-fed, with the knowledge that only a few miles away, Oikawa is in a white room, on a white bed. Guilt, he thinks. This strange, empty feeling is guilt. He doesn’t like being here without Oikawa, and he doesn’t want to be. He misses him terribly. He gazes unseeingly at the mats on the floor. He thinks about Ushijima finding Oikawa lying on the -

‘Iwaizumi?’ Ushijima frowns.

‘Ah - sorry.’ Iwaizumi smiles faintly at him. His heart is beating too fast, again. ‘Just thinking.’

‘I’ll call you a taxi,’ Ushijima says, and rises with the grace of a huge oak, gathering both plates in one huge hand. ‘Please stay calm.’

‘I’m calm,’ Iwaizumi mutters, but he takes deep breaths, even so. Just because he can - not because Ushijima told him to. Ushijima narrows his eyes, but heads to the kitchen without argument.

Iwaizumi slips his boots on, while he waits. They’re the only non-sports shoes that he owns. He had bought them on a trip with Oikawa, two years ago. Oikawa had gushed about them - ‘Iwa-chan doesn’t look like a gym rat anymore!’ - and after pushing Oikawa into a tower of shoeboxes, he’d bought them. He had been red around the ears at Oikawa’s delight, stuffing Oikawa’s easy, sly grin into his pocket along with his receipt. He hadn’t understood his embarrassment back then, but now, the way that his cheeks had stained themselves a cranberry wine colour makes perfect sense. 

The taxi beeps. Iwaizumi shouts a goodbye to Ushijima, who comes to see him off. ‘If you need a place to stay tonight, you are welcome to return,’ Ushijima tells him. For a moment, Iwaizumi wonders whether he’s supposed to give Ushijima a hug, now that they’re sort-of-friends. He decides against it. He likes Ushijima, but he’s not sure he’d survive any actual physical contact.

Once in the car, the quiet, soft hum of the engine gives Iwaizumi too much time to remember the deathly pallor of Oikawa’s face, the tubes, his spidery hands. What if he’s worse, today? What if it has to get worse, before it gets better? How deep does the hole go? He realises he’s jiggling his knee. He stops. The tension swells to unbearable levels, so he begins jiggling it again. Maybe it’s contagious, he thinks, maybe it’s my turn. Hasn’t he always been quick to anger? Maybe that’s a symptom. Maybe it’s not just Oikawa who needs to be propped up - maybe he does, too. He shakes his leg more intensely. The approaching hospital, with its looming walls and sharp angles, makes him feel as though he’s about to be jailed. He pays the driver, and walks on his shaky legs into the building.

By the time he actually makes it to Oikawa’s room, he feels as though he’s going to spill over, and he’s terrified to open the door. It feels worse than it had yesterday, somehow: at least, then, he’d been desperate to confirm that Oikawa was still alive. Now he already knows that. He already knows what waits for him behind the door. Iwaizumi will never leave Oikawa. He knows that he will never leave him again - not in the same way. He will never allow Oikawa to cut the red string. But in that knowledge is dread, too: a promise to stay isn’t a promise to fix. Is there any use in staying with Oikawa if his presence is inadequate? What if Oikawa needs something completely different to him? What if - and this is the question that Iwaizumi fears the most - Oikawa needs him to leave? Perhaps he’s just a collection of stones in Oikawa’s pocket, weighing him down.

He opens the door and steps inside. As soon as he’s within the room he’s overcome with the urge to leave, but he stays. He will always stay for Oikawa - isn't that the promise he's made?

‘Iwa-chan!’ Oikawa looks - to Iwaizumi’s relief - a lot better. The tubes are gone. He’s dressed in one of his own hoodies, rather than a hospital gown. His face still lacks some of its usual colour, but his lips are brighter than the dried-up peony pink they had been the day before. He’s even sitting up on his bed, cross-legged, with a magazine. Iwaizumi recognises the socks he’s wearing: he’d given them as a Christmas gift, their second year at Seijoh. Alien print. Horrible. Oikawa’s favourite gift, that year.

‘Hey.’ Iwaizumi smiles, despite himself. Oikawa’s face had lit up as soon as he’d walked through the door. He could get used to seeing that, he thinks.

‘I thought you’d gone back to Miyagi!’

‘Without saying goodbye?’ Iwaizumi snorts. ‘I’m, uh. Actually - I can be here for a while longer.’

‘What about school?’

‘My mum called them. I’m staying,’ Iwaizumi mumbles, and feels a telltale warmth bloom in his cheeks. He sits down on the chair next to the bed in order to give himself a few seconds to calm down.

‘Well - I’m allowed home this evening,’ Oikawa ventures, once Iwaizumi has settled himself. He looks a little nervous. He shifts his long legs. ‘As long as - the bloods come back fine.’ He doesn’t meet Iwaizumi’s eyes, as he smooths out invisible creases on the sheet.

‘Alone?’ Iwaizumi frowns. He doesn’t like the sound of that at all. He thinks about the painkillers, and the vomit, and the unlocked front door. He thinks: over my dead body, Oikawa.

‘Well - yeah,’ Oikawa says, awkwardly, and has the decency to look apologetic about it.

‘No you’re not,’ Iwaizumi says flatly. ‘I’m coming with you. Sorry.’ He’s not sorry at all. 

Oikawa squints at him.

‘Not negotiable,’ Iwaizumi mutters. ‘So I hope you have somewhere to put me.’

Oikawa’s eyes get even more squinty.

‘What?’ Iwaizumi feels that he probably shouldn’t snap at someone in a hospital bed, but it has been a rough few days.

‘You want to come back with me?’ Oikawa mumbles the words into his own sleeve, biting at a ragged edge. ‘Really? After - ?’

There’s really no telling whether that ‘after’ refers to their kiss - which feels to Iwaizumi as though it happened in a different lifetime - or the painkillers. But it doesn’t matter: his answer is the same. Iwaizumi’s patience is so thin that it’s become transparent. He has felt more emotions in the past few days than he even has names for. He has no interest in any more feelings burning through him. He has no interest in letting Oikawa go home alone. ‘Listen.’ He points his index finger at Oikawa, who’s unhappily gazing at his own thumbnail. ‘After anything, okay? After anything. It doesn’t matter. I should - never have left you - I know you can’t make good decisions! I know you can’t be trusted! I still left you -’ Iwaizumi stops talking, because his throat is feeling dry and tight - like a sunburn, but sharper.

‘Hey,’ Oikawa says, ‘hey, no - it’s not like that, Iwa-chan.’ Iwaizumi can’t look at him. He looks better, but better is relative: he’s still in a damn hospital bed. He’s still wearing the soft grey hoodie that only comes out during moments of duress. Iwaizumi can remember other situations that he's seen it brought out: the flu, when his cat died, the day after they graduated. And now, in the hospital, after - the incident. Iwaizumi’s brain brakes and swerves around the word.

‘Iwa-chan! Please! It’s not -!’ Oikawa’s voice breaks. It’s that break that pulls Iwaizumi’s cracks back together, because the thought of being a contributing factor to Oikawa’s misery is horrifying. He forces himself to look up from his hands.

‘Stop it,’ Oikawa says shrilly, and he’s up on his knees, and Iwaizumi thinks, shit, should you be lying down? ‘Stop it, it was not your fault, please don’t talk about it like that, if you think it was your fault you need to go back home, because - I can’t have you here with me, if you think that -’

‘It’s okay,’ Iwaizumi says, his voice coming out a little too high-pitched as well, and hating himself for it. Oikawa’s the one in pain, here; he has no right - ‘I’m sorry. It’s just - hard to know that I wasn’t there -’

‘I didn’t let you!’ Oikawa swings his legs around so that they’re hanging off the bed. He shuffles a little closer to Iwaizumi. Those damn alien socks, Iwaizumi thinks, mildly hysterical. ‘It was me, Iwa-chan - Hajime. I didn’t answer your calls. I thought -’ Oikawa swallows. ‘I thought it was better.’

‘Why would it have been better?’ Iwaizumi stands up. The chair is too restrictive; he needs to move. His veins feel like shorting circuits. ‘Why would you - ever - think that? Because of the - ?’

Oikawa flushes scarlet. His eyes are threateningly shiny. ‘Yes!’

‘I’m sorry if it was so awful for you that you couldn’t answer my calls!’ Iwaizumi laughs. ‘Shit, Oikawa - I’m sorry - I don’t care if you don’t want it. I just don’t want to lose you. Friend, whatever, I - it doesn’t matter.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘That phonecall was the worst moment of my life.’

‘Phonecall?’ Oikawa’s brows knit together.

‘You called me - during. You said you just wanted to hear my voice.’ Iwaizumi mumbles it. He barely wants to say the words at all. It feels like ripping stitches from a wound, leaving it red and dripping all over again. Iwaizumi’s face feels too hot. He wonders if he can open the window any wider.

Oikawa stares at him, mouth slightly open. ‘I did what?’

‘Do you not - remember?’ Iwaizumi wishes that he could forget, but he doesn’t think that the sad, wispy voice will ever leave him.

Oikawa’s flush has only spread further down his face, staining his neck like paint. He opens his mouth.

There’s a thump as the door handle hits the wall. Oikawa and Iwaizumi both jerk back, snapping their eyes over to the door. It's just a draft, from the cracked window, but it shakes them both out of the revelations - back into the mundanity of a hospital room, of the present. The moment trembles, and falls to the floor, smashing into irretrievable pieces.

Iwaizumi clears his throat. Oikawa is flushed and staring down at his hands.

‘Want to get something to eat?’ Iwaizumi asks, because he can’t think of anything else, and the tension is as thick as freshly poured cement.

‘No,’ Oikawa says, ‘I think I - might want to be on my own.’

Iwaizumi bites his lip. ‘Will you be okay?’

‘I mean, I’m already in hospital,’ Oikawa says, ‘so I’m not sure what other damage I can cause.’ He grins a little weakly, but Iwaizumi smiles back anyway, and sees the relief spread across Oikawa's face

‘Give me your address,’ Iwaizumi says. ‘You’re being discharged tonight, right? I’ll set stuff up for you.’

Oikawa swallows. ‘Um - I don’t think that’s the best -’

‘Don’t be an asshole,’ Iwaizumi says. ‘We already agreed.’

‘It’s not that,’ Oikawa mutters. ‘I didn’t - have time to clean.’ He looks away.

Ah. Iwaizumi’s stomach drops unpleasantly. ‘I can do it,’ he says, although the image of Oikawa lying still on the bathroom floor swims unbidden into his mind, and he shivers, despite the warmness of the hospital.

Oikawa shakes his head. ‘I don’t -’

‘Let me,’ Iwaizumi says, dredging up all his courage from what feels like a near-empty well. ‘I don’t - want you to come home and see it like that.’ His voice gains strength as he realises how true that is. It can’t happen. He feels a surge of panic. The first thing Oikawa sees, after leaving the hospital, cannot be the reminders of his - incident. 

Oikawa gnaws on his lip, but he tells Iwaizumi the address, anyway, and Iwaizumi steels himself as he leaves the room. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sex in this one! if you're not interested, stop reading at 'Oikawa’s hands pull at his shirt' and start reading again at '‘Fuck,’ he mutters.'

Oikawa’s apartment is not what Iwaizumi had expected. It doesn’t look anything like Oikawa’s room at home. There’s nothing to suggest anything of who he is: no aliens, no volleyball, not even any of the mountains of milk bread Iwaizumi had been faced with repeatedly when they were younger. Instead, there’s a lot of white. White walls - white space. Iwaizumi doesn’t like it. Even if nothing terrible had ever happened here, there would have still been an emptiness to it, Iwaizumi thinks.

But this house has cradled a disaster within its walls, and so there is more in it than emptiness. He stands in the badly-lit entrance, trying to gain the courage to step further inside. It’s not so much the fact that he doesn’t know what he’ll find: it’s the fact that he thinks he does know exactly what he’s going to see. It will be Oikawa’s sadness made sentient - and he doesn’t want Oikawa’s sadness to exist at all.

Iwaizumi takes a further step into the building. It smells stale and sick. He drops his bag down where he stands, not wanting to bring it any further in. He doesn’t want the sickness to infect his clothes. He knows it’s not that kind of illness, but - he think there must be something infectious, too, somehow, surely? How can so much pain remain contained inside one body?

He doesn’t know the layout, so every closed door feels equally ominous. Any door could be the bathroom where Oikawa had lain, prone and dying. Any door could be the bedroom where he’d put the pills into his mouth, and swallowed again and again.

He can see the kitchen at the end of the corridor. He goes there first: it feels like a neutral place to start. Nothing terrible has ever happened in a kitchen, he thinks.

He is wrong. The kitchen feels touched by the sadness, too: there are empty plates and mugs piled up next to the sink, leaning with a precarious tilt. There's a selection of unidentifiable crumbs on the floor, disgusting on Iwaizumi's socks. As he'd expected, there's nothing in the moldering fridge except some out of date fish, and some Pocari Sweat. It's a bleak snapshot of a life. He wishes - for the thousandth time - that he hadn't let Oikawa leave. That he'd gone with him. That he'd done anything at all. But how could I have known? Iwaizumi thinks, with a certain desperation, trying to bargain with his own thoughts. There’s no way I could have known, he thinks again, more firmly. He almost believes it, that time.

The next door he opens turns out to be Oikawa's bedroom, and the bathroom is in there, too. Even after a few days of emptiness, it smells unwashed and unclean. He opens the window as the first port of call: he thinks that if he can get rid of that miserable smell, everything else will be easier to deal with. Iwaizumi tries not look at the rest of the room, yet; he’s keeping his eyes unfocused, gazing at the inoffensive curtains, but he can't keep it up. It’s his duty to see it, he thinks. To not look at the scene before him would be to deny the reality of the past six weeks. He focuses his gaze on the bed, instead.

The bed, as Ushijima had intimated, is covered in a deluge of painkiller packets. There are quite a few white pills mixed in with the blue sheets, too, like a snowstorm. Had he dropped them when his hands were shaking too much to hold onto them? Had he noticed them falling at all? The brands are all different, as though he had scambled through his medicine cabinet and taken whatever he could find. There has been so much hurt inside this one room, and the evidence of its overflow is all over the bed.

Iwaizumi realises, distantly, that his body is trembling, but he doesn't feel it personally; it’s as though it’s happening to someone else. From far away, he makes a decision. He will fix this house for Oikawa, if it takes all day. If he has to put Oikawa to bed to finish it, and clean through the night, he will do that too. No more of this, he thinks: no more, no more. It stops, now.

He finds a plastic bag under the sink in the kitchen, and heads back into the bedroom. He strips the sheets and shakes them in the air, watching as the painkiller packets and wrappers float to the floor with a grace they don’t deserve. Kneeling on the floor, he gathers them up in his hands. It is a relief when they're in the plastic bag, out of his sight.

As he removes the pillowcases, the endlessly familiar smell of Oikawa’s shampoo overwhelms him, and he makes a desperate noise of disbelief. His eyes do fill with tears, then - he’d managed to avoid it until that moment through sheer force of will, but the smell that he knows so well, in the middle of such destruction, is too much to contend with. He curls a hand around the pillow and pulls it towards himself. He sits cross-legged on the bed, holding the pillow close to his chest, letting the tears fall onto the fabric, staining it a darker blue. As he cries, he rocks himself gently, as his mother used to do for him if he skinned his knee, or had a cold, or just felt sad. He lets himself stay there for a while. The fire inside him burns itself out, leaving black skeleton trees behind.

He gives himself time. He rises slowly, still holding Oikawa’s pillow close, and with it, the smell of him. He gazes around the rest of the room through his new hazy calm. It’s not as bad as he had feared - as the bed had suggested: there are a few plates dotted around, but it looks curiously unlived in. Iwaizumi wonders how much time Oikawa actually spends in here. He releases his grip on the pillow, slowly. 

He balls the bedding as small as it will go, and takes it to the washing machine. Oikawa has managed to acquire three unopened boxes of laundry detergent, so Iwaizumi opens one of them. It smells good. Iwaizumi had never realised how affecting smell could be before he experienced the apartment-permeating staleness. He hopes it never smells like that again. He takes a deep sniff of the artificially floral powder. Something loosens in his throat. He closes the washing machine door, and sits back on his heels, feeling indefinably better.

The bathroom is next, he knows. He can’t put it off forever, but God, how he wants to for just a little longer. He heads back into Oikawa’s bedroom, with the bathroom door inside. Iwaizumi touches the door handle, but he feels that there’s an invisible line preventing him from entering it, but he shakes his head at his own silliness: there’s no line. He takes a deep breath and pushes it open.

There’s nothing there; it’s clean. Someone has already - miraculously - cleaned the whole thing. There’s no vomit on the floor. There’s certainly no chalk outline marking where Oikawa had lain. When he creaks open the medicine cabinet above the sink - just a crack, at first, and then entirely - there’s nothing in it apart from band-aids and a knee supporter: someone has removed everything that Oikawa could use to harm himself with. Ushijima, he thinks. It was Ushijima. It couldn’t have been anyone else. He feels tears prickling at his eyelids again, but this time, it’s in pure relief.

He stands in the doorway for a long time, trying to see the misery in it all, but it’s gone - cleaned away, thrown out. There is freshness, instead. It’s just a bathroom. There’s nothing to fear.

The front door slams, and Iwaizumi starts. ‘Iwa-chan? Are you here? They let me go early!’

‘In here,’ Iwaizumi manages, although his voice sounds a little creaky.

‘Oh, no, Iwa-chan, don’t -’ He hears Oikawa’s footsteps coming quickly, and then come to a sudden stop, next to him. He gazes at the sparkling bathroom, too - there’s as much shock on his face as Iwaizumi is sure there had been on his own. ‘Did you - ?’

‘No,’ Iwaizumi says, truthfully.

‘Then -’

‘Ushijima, I think,’ Iwaizumi murmurs.

‘Ushijima?’ Oikawa sounds staggered.

‘You know he’s the one who found you?’

‘I - no?’ Oikawa sounds a little frantic, now - the shock turning straight to panic. ‘How did he know?’

‘You were off at practice.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it,’ Iwaizumi says, and laughs, trembly. ‘You know he’s kind of obsessed with you anyway. He notices shit.’

Oikawa doesn’t laugh. Instead, he’s staring at the bathroom as though realising something for the first time - something wonderful, and affirming. ‘Ushijima did this for me?’

‘People fucking love you, Oikawa,’ Iwaizumi says, more forcefully than he means to, but maybe it’s okay that it sounds fierce, because maybe then Oikawa will listen to him, and maybe he’ll even start to believe it. ‘Even Ushijima, clearly, who really, let’s be honest, shouldn’t like you at all, and should have like, come and thrown shit at your window.’

‘I mean - that’s fair,’ Oikawa mumbles, but he’s still gazing at the tiles, lost in the reflection.

Iwaizumi feels a wave of fondness. ‘It’s okay,’ he says, more gently. ‘I - uh, didn’t really - finish cleaning before you came home. So if you want to just sit down for a while, then -’

‘I’m fine,’ Oikawa says, ‘and it’s my mess, so I’ll clean it up too.’ He sounds a little distant, but firm, underneath it. Iwaizumi doesn’t like the distance; he wants to shake the cobwebs out of Oikawa’s head, but he think they’ll come loose eventually by themselves, and he doesn’t know if he can hasten the process.

That evening, they both clean Oikawa’s apartment, together. It doesn’t take as long as Iwaizumi had expected it to, and as the two of them stand at the sink, washing and drying plates, it feels so natural to lean over and kiss Oikawa that he only just manages to stop himself. As Oikawa mops the floor - expression serious but not unhappy, he thinks - Iwaizumi wants nothing more than to walk up behind him and wrap him in his arms, and keep him safe there.

Iwaizumi knows that it will take a while for Oikawa to fully claw himself fully out of the pit he’s found himself in. He’s okay with that; it’s natural, and he already looks better. There is a light in his eyes - a little dim, but there. But he senses that the other issue between them - the kiss, the dance they’ve been dancing for years - is something that can’t be rushed either. He doesn’t want to frighten Oikawa away; he’s already experienced that loss, once, and he doesn’t think his heart can take another.

So for now, it’s this: the two of them in Oikawa’s newly-clean apartment, mopping and sweeping and talking and laughing. And sometimes Oikawa will step in too close, closer than a friend would, and Iwaizumi’s heart will leap and flip - and then he’ll step back again, cheeks colouring slightly, and teeth coming out to worry at his mouth, again. And Iwaizumi can wait - for Oikawa, he’d wait forever - but the thought that Oikawa might not realise he’s allowed to close the final gap between them is bothersome. He’s probably been allowed since they were - well. Since always.

They are standing on a precipice, wobbling, two toes over the edge. And if it’s taken an overdose to get them to that point - well. Maybe it'll make a good story, Iwaizumi thinks grimly. Perhaps, at some indefinite point in the future, when it’s less raw. And maybe they will never laugh about it, but maybe one day it will inspire a wry grimace rather than an overwhelming sense of sadness. He thinks about that someday acceptance as he mops the floor. Cleaning Oikawa’s apartment isn’t what he’d have chosen to be doing, if someone had asked how he’d be spending a holiday, but at the same time, it’s exactly what he wants to be doing.

Life is strange that way.

* * *

 

Iwaizumi stays with Oikawa. He had planned to stay for a week, but by the end of that first week, he thinks he’ll stay another one.

He puts it to Oikawa, one evening, as he washes up his soup bowl. ‘I don’t want to go home yet.’

Oikawa smiles, and ducks his head. ‘I don’t want you to go home.’

So that’s that. He stays.

It’s not a perfect situation: it’s difficult, at first. Not bad - but not easy. Iwaizumi is a little on edge, and Oikawa can sense it, which makes him equally edgy. There’s only one bedroom in Oikawa’s tiny apartment, which means that Iwaizumi is sleeping on a futon in the living room. The living room windows let in too much light when the sun rises, and Oikawa has to come through when he leaves for class in the morning anyway, inevitably waking Iwaizumi up with his total inability to be silent.

But - well. Oikawa’s doing okay, Iwaizumi thinks. He assumes. He still doesn’t know exactly what had happened between the night of the kiss, and the night of the painkillers - he wasn’t there, so he can’t compare. That’s six weeks of horror that he hadn’t been able to parry, and it kills him, but he can’t change the situation. He can only go by what he sees now, and what he sees now is Oikawa doing okay. He’s eating. He’s sleeping. His shoulders don’t slump as they had in the hospital. But it’s the uncertainty of it: how can he ever be sure? What if in another six weeks he’s back in the same white room?

That uncertainty boils over into panic, one innocuous afternoon during his second week in Tokyo. It should have been an easy trip. Iwaizumi had been given a list of groceries, but Oikawa’s handwriting had been too untidy to read, on one of the lines.

He calls Oikawa.

Oikawa doesn’t pick up. Iwaizumi thinks, with a purposeful calmness: that’s strange - he wasn’t planning on going anywhere, was he?

He calls Oikawa again, and again there’s no answer. Iwaizumi places his basket on the floor next to his feet with a deliberaten thunk. It’s not that Iwaizumi is scared - not at all - but he is leaving the store, and his legs feel weak and boneless, and if there's a stone in his throat then he can't explain that, because he's not worried about it - he's fine, it's fine, isn't it? It’s really -

He makes the fifteen minute walk back in seven and a half, and spends the whole seven minutes calling Oikawa over and over and over. His mind is carefully blank. When he makes it back to the apartment, his hand doesn’t shake as he opens the door.

‘Iwa-chan!’ Oikawa grins toothily up at him from a kneeling position on the floor. He’s trying to assemble a table.

Iwaizumi stares at Oikawa for a moment - who is fine, and not lying in a pool of his own bile at all, not that Iwaizumi had expected to find that, but God, he had expected to find it, hadn’t he - but just prodding at a table leg with one thoughtful finger.

He feels it happening, but he can’t stop it. His face crumples.

‘Iwa-chan?’ Oikawa scrambles up, grabs his arm. ‘Hey - what’s?’

Iwaizumi can’t speak; he’s sobbing too hard. He brings his hands up to try and hide the tears.

‘I’ll clean it up!’ Oikawa says, ‘I - it’s just a table -’

This is such a non-sequitur that Iwaizumi is momentarily shocked out of his misery. ‘What?’ he sniffs.

‘The table!’ Oikawa points down at the pile of wood and screws. ‘I - didn’t know you’d be so upset when you saw it - it’s just a table!’ He stares at Iwaizumi with confused, wide eyes, wringing his hands.

‘It’s - it’s not the table!’ He wipes at his damp cheeks. ‘Why would it be the table, even? I - I tried to call you from the store but you didn’t pick up and I thought -’ He feels his eyes filling again, and he swallows, turning away. ‘But you’re fine,’ he says, to himself as much as Oikawa.

‘You could sound happier about it,’ Oikawa says, laughing shakily, but he’s wrapping his arms so tightly around Iwaizumi, right there in the hallway, letting his hands fall to Iwaizumi’s waist, squeezing. Iwaizumi puts his head on Oikawa’s shoulder and lets it stay there. This is new, he thinks. Oikawa comforting him. He thinks he might like it. When one of Oikawa’s hands come up to scratch gently at his scalp, he knows he likes it. He wipes his tears on Oikawa’s sweater, and hears Oikawa laugh in response.

‘I’m sorry I made you worry,’ Oikawa murmurs. ‘I’m fine, Iwa-chan, I promise. Please don’t worry.’

‘I didn’t mean to,’ Iwaizumi mutters, feeling more stupid by the minute. ‘I just - the last time you didn’t pick up -’

‘Let’s go out on the balcony,’ Oikawa interrupts him quickly. ‘You need some air.’

‘I don’t,’ Iwaizumi mumbles mulishly, but he lets Oikawa lead him by the hand into his bedroom, and out onto tiny balcony overlooking the world below.

The city glitters underneath them. So many lives. There must be so much pain, Iwaizumi thinks, but then, there will be the joy, too. He wonders how many people are in the blossoming pink stages of a first love, and how many people are sinking into a sour black loneliness. How many are thinking about how it might feel to let a strip of painkillers slip down their throat, creating a fetid pond in their stomach? Who’s lying cold, in the back of a speeding ambulance? Who's reaching out their own warm hands to help?

The evening light burns slow and golden, and all the buildings have been dipped in honey.

‘It’s not pretty,’ Oikawa murmurs, ‘but it’s not bad, is it?’ He turns to meet Iwaizumi where they stand. There’s a strength in his gaze, steady and soft, and none of the edginess that Iwaizumi has seen so much of in the past few years. It’s just Oikawa, in an old pair of jeans and rolled up sleeves. He looks healthy. The poison, for now, is gone. Iwaizumi is used to Oikawa’s roiling self - the mercury inside him constantly rising and falling - but the man standing in front of him is grounded, living on the earth. Proud. Iwaizumi is proud. He lets himself feel the truth of it, for once.

Iwaizumi smiles, and casts his eyes downwards. From milk bread to crushes, he has never been able to hide anything from Oikawa. Oikawa must know already, but if their eyes met now - it’ll be scrawled all over his pupils.

‘Iwa-chan,’ Oikawa murmurs. He touches Iwaizumi’s hand with his own - gentle and light. ‘I can’t remember why I can’t touch you, anymore.’ His face has a sweet softness to it, like a good, ripe peach. Iwaizumi can’t wrench his eyes away.

Iwaizumi reaches out and touches Oikawa’s hand with the same quick lightness. He remembers how the knuckles felt under his thumbs: delicate and small and dangerous, too. He remembers, too, the IV tube - a less gentle presence, in Oikawa’s skin. No, he thinks - no, it’s over. He touches the hand again: there’s nothing there except warm skin.

‘I mean - there must have been a reason we never...’ Oikawa murmurs. ‘Do you think?’

‘You weren’t seeing things right.’

Oikawa smiles. His eyes drop, and a shyness spreads slow across his mouth. ‘I see you, though, now.’

They both reach out at the same time. Their clumsy earnestness means that their hands bump lightly before their fingers find each other and knot together. The moment shivers in the air around them, like a faraway song floating in through an open window. It’s here - they’re both here. They both have their eyes open. They see each other as who they are. Oikawa tilts his head to one side, and his smile has only spread further, along with a telling pink flush.

‘Are you gonna do it, or shall I?’ Iwaizumi mumbles.

‘Give me a minute! I can’t mess this up!’

‘You know what’ll happen if you mess it up?’ Iwaizumi tells him, serious.

‘What?’

‘Nothing at all,’ Iwaizumi says, and lunges forward to kiss the corner of Oikawa’s wonderful, maddening mouth - just the edge of it, where his lip meets his cheek. It’s not their first kiss, but it feels like the beginning.

Oikawa makes a noise of shock, and even as Iwaizumi leans back on his heels, grabs Iwaizumi’s collar and pulls him back into their private orbit.

‘This is it now, okay?’ Iwaizumi speaks into the shared gap between their mouths. Oikawa breathes in his words. ‘No more running. No more crazy.’ He pauses. ‘Well, probably some crazy. But next time - tell me.’

‘Iwa-chan, so romantic,’ Oikawa mutters, rolling his eyes, but not arguing.

‘I mean it,’ Iwaizumi says. ‘I’m not letting you cut me out again. That doesn’t do it for you? Shit, I can buy you roses, or whatever. Chocolates?’

Oikawa giggles and pulls back, covering his face with his hands. It’s delightful, Iwaizumi thinks, amazed. Oikawa is delightful. He peeps out at Iwaizumi through long, pretty fingers. ‘I like chocolates,’ he says, shyly.

‘Shit! Great, then! We’ll do it all,’ Iwaizumi says, moving his arm in a sweeping motion that takes in the balcony, the city below, and the golden sky. He chides himself for his eagerness: it’s self-indulgent and unnecessary - and they’ve done everything backwards anyway. But - well - he knows an artisanal chocolate shop. Oikawa would like their dark stuff, Iwaizumi thinks. Maybe Oikawa would roll his sleeves up in the way that Iwaizumi likes, his forearms resting on the wood. Maybe their legs would press together at the knees, underneath the small table. Iwaizumi shivers.

The mood is so warm and intimate that Iwaizumi feels that he could ask the question he hasn’t got an answer to, yet. He reaches down and takes both of Oikawa’s hands in his own.

‘Oikawa,’ Iwaizumi says, and he hadn’t realised his own voice could ever sound like that, like a caress on his tongue, ‘please - can you tell me why you did it?’

‘My knee hurt.’ Oikawa’s face is turned away, looking out over the city, but Iwaizumi can still hear him perfectly. ‘Things hadn’t felt right.’

‘With your knee?’

‘No, just -’ Oikawa sighs. ‘But my knee really hurt.’

‘But you didn’t just take one pill,’ Iwaizumi murmurs, stroking over Oikawa’s knuckles with the pads of his thumbs.

‘No.’ Oikawa grins a little crooked, flicks his eyes back over to Iwaizumi. ‘All of them.’

‘All of them,’ Iwaizumi murmurs, nodding. ‘Why?’

‘My knee hurt.’ The grin has faded into wistfulness. There’s a small quiver to his lips. ‘It just hurt.’

‘Just your knee?’ Iwaizumi presses. Oikawa’s breathing is slow and steady. It’s safe to continue.

‘I don’t know.’ Oikawa frowns down at his hands in Iwaizumi’s own.

‘Shall I tell you what I think?’ Iwaizumi murmurs.

‘I don’t know.’ Oikawa’s shaking his head, but despite the tension in his hands he’s letting Iwaizumi stroke them. He’s not running away - not this time.

‘I think,’ Iwaizumi says, and it’s still so gentle - he suddenly can’t remember how to be anything else - ‘that your knee did hurt. But a lot of other things hurt too. And you thought - maybe you got confused. Maybe you didn’t know how to talk about it. Maybe you focused on your knee because it was easier than the rest of it.’ He swallows, because he doesn’t really want to discuss the next part either. ‘And then, maybe you thought that all the pain would stop if you took all the painkillers. Maybe you didn’t mean to die. Maybe you did. I’m not sure that part matters. What do you think?’

Oikawa’s hands are shaking more intensely, and Iwaizumi strokes them more firmly. They’re very soft under his fingers. Ever since he was twelve years old Oikawa has slathered them in moisturiser before he sleeps. The moisturiser smells like roses.

‘Hajime -’ he says, and he lets out a trembling sigh. ‘Maybe that’s - maybe that’s right. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I never meant for this - for such a drama -’

‘That’s you though, isn’t it,’ Iwaizumi says, and laughs shakily, ‘always about the drama.’

Oikawa laughs too, although it’s correspondingly wobbly. ‘Well - this wasn’t a fun episode, was it?.’

‘I dunno,’ Iwaizumi says, unable to stop his mouth from curling at one side in a fond, stupid smile, ‘I got a holiday out of it.’

‘Let me know when you want another one,’ Oikawa says, horribly, but he’s grinning again. Iwaizumi feels his heart tie itself in knots. He slides his hands up to Oikawa's wrists, where the skin is thin and fragile. They sit like that for a long time - Hajime feeling the soft veins under his thumbs - proof of life, of Oikawa’s continued existence, despite everything. And despite everything Oikawa has done to hasten the silence of hs thrumming heart, it still beats steadily, steadily, steadily.

They flop into the cheap deck chairs behind them, and they sit there for a long time. They start on separate chairs, polite and decent, but as the sun dips lower and their hesitations disappear along with it, Oikawa climbs onto Iwaizumi’s lap, and rests his head on his shoulder. There are no visible stars above them, and the moon is a small, weak sliver, but they stare at the sky all the same. Iwaizumi watches the sky as Oikawa slips further down his body, and his breathing evens and slows.

‘Tooru.’

‘Hnn.’ Soft hands stroke at his neck.

‘I’m gonna take you to bed. Can you stand?’

Oikawa mutters crossly under his breath, keeping his eyes firmly closed, but he swings his legs around. Iwaizumi slides out from under him, standing up, pulling at his hands, and Oikawa finally groans and allows himself to be forced into a standing position. Iwaizumi can’t resist it: he kisses Oikawa on his sleepy, slack mouth. Oikawa makes a small, pleased noise, and bends down to rub his forehead on Iwaizumi’s. Iwaizumi’s heart swells three sizes.

‘Bed,’ Iwaizumi says thickly. He pulls Oikawa back into his own apartment, closing the glass door behind them. Oikawa chirps quietly, walking slow and clumsy.

Iwaizumi leads Oikawa to his own bedroom. As soon as he sees the bed, Oikawa flops onto it and curls up, fully dressed. This idiot, Iwaizumi thinks, and he’s never felt so in love.

The intimacy is warm and gentle around them, and Iwaizumi feels safe and so content inside their private universe. Gazing down at Oikawa - who seems to have immediately fallen back to sleep - Iwaizumi feels a quiet hesitation. He climbs onto the bed, too, but he doesn’t lie down - he just sits cross-legged, watching. Oikawa’s face has such a peace to it, in that moment. Iwaizumi feels so grateful to see it. He has never felt more grateful for anything in his life, really, than to be sitting on Oikawa’s bed with him, after kissing him again, and again, and again.

Oikawa stirs, underneath him, and opens one eye. ‘Undress me,’ he murmurs.

Iwaizumi chokes on his tongue. ‘Um.’

Oikawa opens both eyes. He glowers up at Iwaizumi with the implacable rage of a tired toddler. ‘I’m tired.’

‘Fine,’ Iwaizumi says, feeling less suave than he ever has in his life. So much for his lofty ideas of romance: he’s nervous to undress his own - well. Figuring out the term for what they are is another issue, for another time.

Oikawa closes his eyes again, and Iwaizumi bites his own lip. His hands feel like the orchestrators of potentialities he’d never dared to believe in. He kneels on the bed, and starts unbuttoning Oikawa’s soft, red shirt. It’s old, but one of Iwaizumi’s favourites.

Iwaizumi pulls the shirt open so that it exposes Oikawa’s torso from neck to stomach. Iwaizumi averts his eyes. They’re tired. Oikawa’s half asleep. He can wait. But the intimacy is so total - so all-encompassing - that Iwaizumi feels himself swallowing.

Iwaizumi reaches for the top button of Oikawa’s jeans, flicking it open. He slowly, carefully, pulls the zipper downwards. Oikawa’s boxers peek out from through the denim. His cheeks feel hotter than ever. He chances a glance at Oikawa’s face, and sees that he’s not asleep at all: his eyes are half-lidded, and his smile is soft with a slow, sweet slyness. ‘Enjoying yourself?’ Iwaizumi grunts, a little snappish in his embarrassment.

‘Yeah.’ Oikawa’s voice is breathy and soft, silky against Iwaizumi’s ears. He lifts his hips up so that Iwaizumi can pull his jeans off more easily. Iwaizumi swallows again. He’s removing Oikawa’s jeans. It’s really happening. The denim, rough against his fingertips, feels like the material that dreams are made of. He pauses to rub his hands over Oikawa’s still-clothed thighs. He’s allowed to do that, now. He pulls Oikawa’s jeans off all the way - Oikawa lifts his hips to help - letting them puddle at his feet.

‘Come up here,’ Oikawa mumbles. He shrugs out of his own shirt. ‘Kiss me, kiss me -’

Iwaizumi laughs outright: an admission of pleasure rather than humour. He’d not expected this, tonight. He's not sure he'd ever expected it. He’d kept the thought of sex with Oikawa in a drawer, taking it out to look at, occasionally. That was how he’d thought it would remain. Oikawa had disappeared after a kiss; what might he do in the afterglow?

But the reality is different: Oikawa is warm and solid, and demanding that Iwaizumi kiss him. He’s leaning up on his elbows so he can grab Iwaizumi by the shirt and pull him on top of him - breath rushing out in a long huff when Iwaizumi falls a little too hard onto his chest. They both laugh. It’s strange. It’s new. It’s fun.

Kiss him. An imperative, a command. Iwaizumi could never say no, anyway. Not to him. He shuffles into a better position, and gazes down at Oikawa, silent and watchful. He brushes Oikawa’s hair from his forehead. Oikawa smiles and turns his head into the touch, closing his eyes for a moment.

‘Kiss me,’ Oikawa whispers again. Iwaizumi can feel a warm breath against the side of his face.

Iwaizumi can’t hold back anymore. He leans in slow, because even now, he’s afraid that if he moves too fast Oikawa will turn into graceful plumes of twirling smoke, right here in his bed. Oikawa cranes his neck up for it, and their lips meet, finally: a circle completing itself. It’s not the first time they’ve kissed, or even the second, now, but it feels like it, to Iwaizumi. This is a kiss that doesn’t go away. This is a kiss that Oikawa can’t run from. It will stay with him in minute ways: in his breast pocket, under the curve of his collars, woven into the laces of his shoes.

Iwaizumi kisses into Oikawa’s mouth with a steady gentle pulse. Oikawa’s hands come up and wrap around his back, stroking under his shirt, scratching his shoulders lightly. Iwaizumi’s breath quickens, and he bites off a mumbled compliment into Oikawa’s lips. Oikawa makes a questioning noise in response, but Iwaizumi is already licking at the soft, plump curve of his lips, and doesn’t feel like pulling away to repeat himself. He never wants to pull away, ever: he wants to die here. Or rather, more accurately: he wants to live here.

Oikawa’s hands pull at his shirt more insistently. Iwaizumi growls, their lips still connected. He likes the way that Oikawa’s hands get rougher at his noise - how Oikawa’s throat swallows convulsively, how the slow undulations of his hips against his own become slightly less regular. It’s going to happen, Iwaizumi thinks - still barely able to believe it.

Iwaizumi cuts off the kiss in order to pull his shirt off, with more haste than he’s ever needed before. He throws it to the end of the bed, where it lands on top of Oikawa’s jeans - and the sight of both of their clothes tangled together pulls at his heartstrings pleasantly. He takes off his jeans, too, for good measure: they go on the pile as well.

He settles back down on top of Oikawa, and finds his mouth wet and warm and eager, opening up immediately. The removal of his jeans was a good call: without the thick denim in the way, their hips fit so nicely together that there must be some sort of catch. He grinds down, experimentally, to see how Oikawa responds.

In a word: perfectly. He gasps sharply, and his head falls back onto the pillow. His eyes have fallen shut somewhere between Iwaizumi’s mouth and the pillow, and there’s a tiny flutter underneath his eyelids.

‘Good?’ Iwaizumi has to swallow a few times to get the word out.

‘Good,’ Oikawa says, and then laughs, running his hand through his own hair. ‘Like - you can’t tell?’

‘Oh, I can tell,’ Iwaizumi says, and angles his hips low and mean, moving them in a slow, grinding circle. When Oikawa begins to push back, Iwaizumi lifts his hips away slightly in a mean tease. Oikawa groans out loud and it’s perfect: low, frustrated, wanting. Iwaizumi wants to bottle that sound and cover himself in it.

‘You wanna - ?’

‘Nah,’ Oikawa says, breathy, ‘like this. It’s like - what schoolkids do, isn’t it? We should do it too. Because we didn’t do it when we were supposed to.’ He smiles up at Iwaizumi, a little shy. ‘Now we can do it properly.’

‘I think we had very different adolescences,’ Iwaizumi mutters darkly, thinking of the few nervous kisses he’d exchanged in the Aoba Johsai bathrooms, and the one quick, dirty handjob behind the gym.

Oikawa is obviously bored with the talk of first kisses and fumblings, because instead of replying, he pushes his hips back up, and this time, Iwaizumi lets himself fall into it - pressing down in earnest, loving the shocked, high moan that bleeds from Oikawa’s mouth into the warm space between them. He presses down again, and again, and each time he’s rewarded. Oikawa’s so hard against him, and he thinks there’s truth in what Oikawa had said about there being value in doing it this way, because despite the fact that they’re both in their boxers, it feels as electrifying as skin on skin contact. He thinks anything more intense might actually kill him.

‘Fuck,’ Iwaizumi grunts, and his low curse is immediately licked up by Oikawa’s quick, clever tongue. ‘Yeah - let me -’

‘Anything,’ Oikawa hisses roughly, jerking his hips up hard and brutal, and Iwaizumi tips forward to kiss him rough and fast. Fuck the slow, gentle warmth from earlier: Oikawa’s cock rubbing hard against his own is ruining his plans to take it slow, kissing Oikawa into a syrupy, sensitive mess. But - then again - Oikawa looks pretty sensitive already: his cheeks are twin cherries, his lips glossy and swollen. The deviation from the plan hasn’t done either of them any harm, he thinks, because he’s harder than he ever remembers being.

The kiss is losing any semblance of delicacy, of their earlier rhythm. It’s spiralling out of control: Oikawa keeps moaning into his mouth, making Iwaizumi’s hips jerk harder, which in turn makes Oikawa move faster, too, chasing the friction with a greedy tilt of his hips. The dam will break, soon - Oikawa’s noises are coming high and loud, burning into Iwaizumi’s skin - he never again wants to go a day without hearing Oikawa whimper some wrecked bastardisation of his name against his mouth or the crook of his neck.

‘I want you to come,’ Iwaizumi grates out, ‘come on me, shit, Tooru, I want it -’

Oikawa gasps and his head falls back. Without warning, he reaches roughly into his boxers and pulls out his cock, palming it quickly, biting his lip until he has to let it fall open in a sobbing keen. Iwaizumi doesn’t think twice: he gets his own hand between them and thumbs at the head of Oikawa’s cock, loving the feel of the dampness under his fingers. Oikawa sobs and pushes into Iwaizumi’s hand. Iwaizumi can feel the tension peaking - Oikawa’s shaking, underneath him, his mouth an O - and then it’s over, done, through: his fingers are covered in Oikawa’s come, and some of it has even got on his stomach, the top of his boxers. Oikawa has branded him. Iwaizumi loves it.

Oikawa trembles through the last pulses of his orgasm, and Iwaizumi lets him jerk against his hand for as long as he wants. But as soon as Oikawa hisses and lets his hips fall back against the bed, Iwaizumi sits back on Oikawa’s thighs and gets a hand inside his own boxers. He jerks his cock with a desperate, frenzied hunger, meeting Oikawa’s blissed out, half-lidded eyes as he pulls at himself. He breathes in short, loud gasps, and the gasps turn into moans, and the moans turn into a strangled wail as he tenses and comes all over Oikawa’s quivering stomach.

‘Fuck,’ he mutters.

‘Yeah,’ Oikawa says, looking beatific and blissful.

Iwaizumi wants nothing more than to flop down next to Oikawa, but out of his constant desire to keep Oikawa as happy as possible, he scoots down to the bottom of the bed and grabs his t-shirt from the pile. He strokes at Oikawa’s stomach until it’s clean and dry, and gives himself a one-over, too.

‘Gross,’ Oikawa says, but he’s smiling up at Iwaizumi with a slightly broken, unguarded expression - there’s such warmth in it, and Iwaizumi feels more exposed than he had during the sex. He gets the sense that Oikawa can see everything he’s thinking - everything that he’s thought for the past five years - and that he accepts all of the dark corners and the hopeless nights and the secret, swooping moments when he’d caught a glimpse of Oikawa’s hands in the right light to make them look perfect.

Iwaizumi says, ‘I love you.’ He pauses. ‘You do know that though, I think.’

Oikawa’s cheeks have regained a little of their heat, but he still meets Iwaizumi’s gaze, and holds it with a sure steadiness. ‘I think I do.’ He laughs, slightly, and turns away. ‘You know I love you, too.’ He flicks his eyes back to Iwaizumi’s. ‘So much,’ he adds, and swallows. ‘Hajime, if it wasn’t for you, I don’t -’

‘Don’t,’ Iwaizumi says, quickly, although he’s not sure it’s the right thing to say.

‘I mean it,’ Oikawa insists, ‘you’re the best thing in my life.’

Iwaizumi grimaces. He’s half-angry about Oikawa’s steadfast belief in him. He's never felt that he deserves it. The best thing in Oikawa’s life is Oikawa himself. He has never understood his own inherent worth. If Iwaizumi is able to do anything for Oikawa, he wants to force him to understand his own merit, on his own terms.

‘You’re the best thing in your life,’ Iwaizumi mutters, because he might as well start now, on Project Increase The Size of Oikawa’s Head. ‘Idiot. It’s always been you.’

Oikawa rolls his eyes, but ducks his head, smiling sweet and young, and Iwaizumi wonders if it’s going to be easier than he’d thought. ‘Iwa-chan.’

‘What,’ Iwaizumi says, narrowing his eyes.

‘Will you let me apologise?’

‘Depends what for.’ He feels a little guarded. He’s not interested in hearing about the painkillers. He’s not interested in thinking about them at all.

‘I - when I kissed you,’ Oikawa begins. ‘And left the next day. I’m sorry I did that.’

It’s not what Iwaizumi had expected to hear, but it is an apology that he’s willing to hear out. ‘Can you explain - why?’

‘I was scared,’ Oikawa murmurs. He props himself up on an elbow. His face is gentle and open. ‘I had wanted it for so long. I didn’t want to see your face. What if you’d hated it? I just - kissed you, Iwa-chan, you didn’t ask me to do it. It wasn’t like we leaned in together. I just lost my mind for a moment.’

‘More than a moment. Like, ten years.’ Iwaizumi can’t help himself.

Oikawa pushes at his shoulder. It’s nice to feel Oikawa’s fingers on his bare skin: even with the lust sated, it’s an easy intimacy that he can’t believe he’s gone so long without. Everything is brighter and warmer with Oikawa next to him. The world feels like a promising place, full of kindness and satisfaction.

‘I couldn’t answer your calls,’ Oikawa says. ‘I thought you were calling to tell me - we weren’t friends anymore. Because I’d ruined it.’ Oikawa smiles, wobbly and weak. ‘Because I’d kissed you.’

For a moment, Iwaizumi can see everything so clearly: Oikawa, afraid, and alone, in his packed-up bedroom, his lips still wet from Iwaizumi’s tongue. Oikawa, in Tokyo, trembling finger hovering over the answer button as Iwaizumi calls and calls and calls. He’s been so alone, Iwaizumi thinks, with a kind of burgeoning horror. He’s been so alone.

‘Oikawa,’ he says, ‘listen.’ He reaches out and pulls at Oikawa’s chin so that he is forced to meet Iwaizumi’s eyes. ‘Even if I hadn’t wanted you back. Even if I hadn’t wanted this. You will never, ever be able to get rid of me. One kiss? Big fucking deal, Tooru. I don’t scare that easy.’

Oikawa laughs, but it’s tinged with a wetness. Iwaizumi leans forward and kisses him again, trying to convey the fierceness of his feelings. The endlessness of the love he feels for this moron. ‘I’ll scare you in the end, Hajime, I - sometimes I fuck things up, so badly -’

‘I don’t care!’ Iwaizumi is getting angry again, but not at Oikawa - at his own inability to make Oikawa understand. ‘I - how do you not get it? What do I need to say? Did you scare me off when you took the pills? No!’ He pulls at the sheet, agitated. ‘I ran to you, Tooru! I fucking ran _towards_ you! I was only scared because I thought I was going to lose you for real. Never scared of you. Shit, I could take you anyway, if it came down to it - you’re not that strong -’

Oikawa laughs again, and buries his face in Iwaizumi’s shoulder. That’s better, Iwaizumi thinks. ‘We’re gonna do this for real, Iwa-chan? You mean it?’ Oikawa isn’t even trying to hide the hope in his voice anymore.

‘I’ve always meant it,’ Iwaizumi says, and only as he says it does he realise how hopelessly true it is. He’s never stood a chance. ‘I want everything with you. For real. However you want to do it. Ball’s in your court.’

‘No,’ Oikawa says, ‘we’re on the same court. Same side of the net. It’s gonna be us now, Hajime. Properly.’ His eyes are bright and happy.

‘That’s - you’re - shut up -’ Iwaizumi blurts out, but he’s laughing into his hands, and he thinks it’s a mixture of relief, and sex endorphins, and all the kisses, and the fact that somehow, after all this pain and sadness and horror, Oikawa is still alive, still here with him, and the ties that bind them have only grown stronger, and gained more strands. ‘Fuck, Oikawa, shit. How do you even do this to me?’

‘I’m just that good,’ Oikawa says, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand. He manages to make it look graceful. ‘And because you love me. So it’s really easy.’

‘I wish that wasn’t true,’ Iwaizumi says darkly. ‘But it is.’

Oikawa cuddles into him, and turns the bedside light off. The room is drenched in an immediate blackness. In the quiet dark, it would be easy to let the worry roll into him. But instead, what floats into his mind are the words that Oikawa had said: it’s the two of them, now, on the same side of the net.

And the two of them together can weather any storm that comes their way. He’s always put stock in that.

And maybe it’s this: after the wrenching, it comes together again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GOD THIS GOT REALLY LONG. SORRY.  
> huge shout out to [my darling loveintheveins!!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveintheveins/pseuds/loveintheveins) who actually made a playlist for this fic before it was even finished (about 6000 words ago, in fact), and it's BEAUTIFUL and wonderfully linear which you can actually listen to [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/analuisall/playlist/4AgMwWbee2mF4XBWiVlpSF?si=kDGTqZLHT2uz3k8zFnP6tg)!! how crazy is that :V
> 
> also shout outs to [majesticanna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/majesticanna/pseuds/majesticanna), [typewritings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/typewritings/pseuds/typewritings), [starjem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starjem/pseuds/starjem) and [nishinoya4yuu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nishinoya4yuu/pseuds/nishinoya4yuu) for not telling me to shut up about this damn fic while i was complaining about it for a solid 2 weeks.
> 
> tumblr @ [weirdmilk](http://www.weirdmilk.tumblr.com); come shout at me about iwaoi

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @ weirdmilk


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